An O*(1.84k) parameterized algorithm for the multiterminal cut problem

  • Authors:
  • Yixin Cao;Jianer Chen;J. -H. Fan

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA and School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, PR China;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing Letters
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

We study the multiterminal cut problem, which, given an n-vertex graph whose edges are integer-weighted and a set of terminals, asks for a partition of the vertex set such that each terminal is in a distinct part, and the total weight of crossing edges is at most k. Our weapons shall be two classical results known for decades: maximum volume minimum(s,t)-cuts by Ford and Fulkerson [11] and isolating cuts by Dahlhaus et al. [9]. We sharpen these old weapons with the help of submodular functions, and apply them to this problem, which enable us to design a more elaborated branching scheme on deciding whether a non-terminal vertex is with a terminal or not. This bounded search tree algorithm can be shown to run in 1.84^k@?n^O^(^1^) time, thereby breaking the 2^k@?n^O^(^1^) barrier. As a by-product, it gives a 1.36^k@?n^O^(^1^) time algorithm for 3-terminal cut. The preprocessing applied on non-terminal vertices might be of use for study of this problem from other aspects.